


Plant to the Sun

by magikfanfic



Category: Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: Bedsharing, F/M, Mentions of sexual activity, Mutual Pining, spoilers for 1.9
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 12:19:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13248105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: **Spoilers for 1.09**“I always saw you.”It was not a line, though he knows it sounded like one. Given the moment and the circumstances and everything that followed, Chase Stein is completely aware of what it sounded like, but it wasn’t. Not at all. Even if he worries that she thinks it was.





	Plant to the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> After watching the latest episode, I had a mighty need to write something about it, and this is what we got. I considered marking it underage, but I wasn't really sure whether it should go there. If enough of you feel like it needs to be marked that please let me know, and I'll adjust it.

“I always saw you.”

It was not a line, though he knows it sounded like one. Given the moment and the circumstances and everything that followed, Chase Stein is completely aware of what it sounded like, but it wasn’t. Not at all. Even if he worries that she thinks it was. Snappy comebacks he has aplenty. Those are different. Those are expected and fun. It’s part of what their--what even are they now, he wonders--thing is built on. She verbally spars with him, and he duels back. With Gert, he doesn’t need any lines. He doesn’t need any illusions. 

But, sometimes, he finds it incredibly difficult to acknowledge the truth, the full and unbridled truth, so he bites his tongue instead, lets her lead. Gert has always been good at leading; it’s just that she doesn’t enjoy it because she gets anxious about it, he knows, all the what if horror scenarios flashing through her head at lightspeed or quicker, probably quicker. He’s positive that her brain is the fastest thing in the known universe. It’s only when the chips are down, when everyone else is rocked completely off center, when Nico or Alex can’t deal for whatever reason, then Gert is there in her combat boots, with her glasses and her purple hair and every bit of fire and spark about her that he is completely enraptured by, to step up and take the reins in hand and lead.

And he likes it. It’s a turn on. Like the way his heart leapt straight into his throat when she pulled him into a private room to dance, pressed right up against him with no warning, no preamble, right into the fray of things, just like always, just like Gert. 

“I always saw you,” he said, and he meant to say a lot more. There were so many other things he wanted to say but didn’t, couldn’t because she was in his arms and smiling at him. 

The rush of danger that floods through your system when you have concocted a plot to take on your murderous maybe evil but with good reason parents throws caution to the wind, makes you take chances you might never even consider before. Which is how they ended up wrapped up in each other, clothes hastily pulled off and pushed aside and torn away, hands clinging and mouths bruised from kissing, his fingers inside her, moaning into her mouth as she twisted her hand just so around the length of him, and then one step further. Another. Another.

He thinks about it constantly. He thinks about nothing else. There is room in his mind for nothing except the taste of her, the small sounds she made, each other sweeter and better than the one before, and he wanted all of them. Each and every one. No, not wanted. He wants. He wants all of them. He wants her. 

He wants her, but he can’t bring himself to say it. Because Gert said it was a one-time thing, and Chase is letting her lead because if he tries, he will fuck it up beyond repair. He might already have anyway, but there was so much happening, what was he supposed to do? Tell her that he has been thinking fondly of her for as long as he can remember? Tell her that he is terrified of falling as far down into this as he wants to go because what if he never stops? What if he never stops, but she does? Or what if he is not removed far enough from his father’s inclinations, his father’s personality and flaws?

What if he hurts her? He doesn’t think he could live with himself if that happened.

So he stays away, and he lets her draw the lines, he lets her steer the ship so to speak, and he waits, and he wants. 

It has been three weeks since the fight at the excavation site. It has been three weeks since they ran away to the underground mansion that Chase and Gert found when they were ten after Gert had spent literal hours on some weird conspiracy website about interesting places around LA. 

No one else had been interested in going with her. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. No one else had been stupid enough to go with her. Amy had tried to forbid any of them from going, threatened to tell their parents, but eventually Gert had managed to cajole the others into keeping Amy busy for a few hours while they snuck away. Chase had grabbed a flashlight. Gert had been fully prepared with rope and water and homemade protein bars and flares in case something terrible happened and they couldn’t get out. When he saw her pull the fully loaded backpack out of the hall closet (where no one had seen her stash it), he had gaped at her for seven minutes while she fidgeted, pushing her glasses up her nose and twirling long dark, wavy hair around one finger.

“What are you looking at?” she had finally asked, nervous, and he could tell that her anxiety was creeping up, up her throat. She had described it to them like that once. A hand crawling up her windpipe from the inside, fingers climbing higher and higher, making it harder to breathe, to focus, to concentrate on anything except making the grip loosen.

“That’s a lot of stuff.”

“It’s just in case.” The waver in her voice told him not to push her, and he hadn’t.

Instead, they had snuck out of the back door, gone out the fence, and the adventure had begun. The mansion, when they found it, when they figured out how to crawl their way inside of it was a lot more stable than they had expected. It still is, truth be told, but Chase vividly remembers that first instant when Gert had shimmied her way down after him--because he went first, completely uncomfortable allowing her into danger ahead of him--and stood in a beam of sunlight that had somehow managed to find its way down there, the only one, and just glowed. He will never forget that image no more than he will forget the way her fingers curled around the back of his neck, her breathy voice in his ear, the way she said his name when she came. 

“I always saw you,” meant more than just that. It meant I am always looking at you. I have always known you. I remember you. I remember all the wonderful things you have done and all the not so wonderful things you have done. I know you, the bad and the good, and I keep looking. I will always keep looking.

Chase wishes he had just said all of that instead. Either then or after at the excavation site when the world felt like it might be ending or beginning, and Gert was looking at him and mad at him and flustered and on edge. He has always seen her so he knows how she gets antsy, how she gets worried and fired up and then says things she doesn’t always mean. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s a wall. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. And while Chase is good at respecting boundaries, he doesn’t know how to get past this without pushing it a little.

He is supposed to be letting her lead, but it is difficult when she is all he can think about. This was always something of a problem, a wave that would drag him under in unexpected moments, the thought and the consideration of her, but it was never this strong before. He never knew everything he knows now like the taste of her on his tongue, like the way she will kiss skin hard and then a second time but slightly softer, an apology for any roughness. Now he knows too much, and it makes him ache inside and out. 

It has been three weeks since he touched her. It has been three weeks since Chase Stein has known anything resembling peace. 

The showdown with their parents is nothing but a messy blur of energy thrown this way and that, of Gert screaming and an ice pick of terror lodging itself in his heart before he heard Old Lace rocketing through the construction site to her side, but even after that he couldn’t really focus, just fired shots willy nilly wherever he could, dazed. Chase still isn’t entirely sure how they got out of that mess, which Nico attributes to the fact that he got hit on the head and might have suffered a concussion. It’s not that. He doesn’t think it’s that. He thinks it’s the fact that Gert said it was a one-time thing and then how he felt like the world had just fucking ended when she screamed, like he wouldn’t have wanted one more moment if anything had happened to her. 

It’s jarring to feel like that. It’s terrifying to feel like that.

It’s everything to feel like that.

But he’s not allowed to say a word about it so he doesn’t. When it gets to be too much, which is often because while the Hostel is a mansion a lot of the rooms are lost to rock and dirt and plants and strange insects so it’s sort of close quarters, he will slink off to the room that has been declared his and lie on the bed, stare at the ceiling, and think of her, and say all the things to her that he wants to say but can’t. Without fail he will remember touching her, which typically leads to him needing to touch himself, her name on his lips when he comes. It’s still too much, of course, it might always be, but it’s easier to handle when he’s alone because then he doesn’t have to hide the fact that he is hopelessly, helplessly enamored with her. 

According to Karo, he is not good at hiding this anyway what with his moon eyes, and his fond smiles, and the way he will always tilt his body toward Gert, a plant to the sun, when she talks or just when she’s in his general vicinity. Things between him and Karo are a lot less strained now that they both know neither of them is interested in the other. He’s apologized to her about that, using her as an easy distraction, and she accepted it, even apologized back if anything she did gave him the wrong impression, though Chase explained it wasn’t her fault in the least, he understands the compulsion that resulted in her doing so. He knows, intimately, what it’s like to disappoint people, to be afraid of their reaction.

He wonders, if he is so transparent why doesn’t Gert say anything? Surely she has noticed. Gert notices everything before anyone so why not the way his heart seems to be straining out of his chest to find her skin again? 

He doesn’t know.

Sighing, he rolls onto his side and stares at the way instead of the ceiling. The bed is oddly both too hard and too soft, threatening to suck him under, to disappear him like the quicksand in all those movies, depending on where he lays. The room smells weird, this mix of must and mildew that comes from slowly sinking little by little into the ground. He was the one to lead them here, he remembers, once they got away from the fight, and there was a moment when Gert looked surprised, pleasantly so, before it flitted away, and she smoothed her face out like a shirt under a hot iron, wrinkles and all traces of feeling gone. The beam of light that she stood in when they shimmied into this place as children shines into the mansion no longer, stolen as the building has continued its decline into the earth.

Chase wishes that hadn’t happen. He would have liked to recreate it, see what Gert would look like now in the same position, but so much more fully, finally, truly herself. Sunlight off purple hair, her lips twitched up in a smile, her hands in his is a dream that keeps pestering him when he attempts to sleep. It comes, and he welcomes it with open arms, slips into it because the other dreams, the dreams of his father, or falling into the open maw of that pit at the construction site are unwanted, unpleasant. Even if it hurts when he wakes up to find that Gert is not there with him, not tucked into his side the way he would like her to be so that he could kiss her cheek and her forehead while she, invariably, mutters at him to be still and go back to sleep.

There are so many things he wants to do with her, but he has no idea whether any of them will ever happen now.

He is waiting for Gert to lead, to make a move, to come back to him, to talk about what happened instead of tossing quips his way, over her shoulder, offhandedly as though they mean nothing. Chase very rarely rises to the occasion these days, answers but does not duel. What he wants is so much more than just that in the same way that it is so much more than just that one moment in that room, wrapped up, chasing something together, not alone, connected.

Maybe it was too much, too fast. He doesn’t regret it, not one moment of it even if it seemed like a push, a wild rushing that flooded through his ears and his inside, a raging river ready to sweep him away, but he knows that they could have taken things slower. You’re supposed to court the girl before you have sex with her, he knows, especially if you feel the way he does, gooey and warm and intoxicated by her very presence. But the situation was unavoidable and palpable, the energy twisted and desperate. Chase didn’t think they were going to die, but he didn’t know what would happen, whether any of them would have ever seen each other again. 

And he couldn’t have lost her without having kissed her at least once. The rest was an unexpectedly welcome bonus that fills his bones and makes his soul churn, but the kiss was really the goal.

Too much too fast for Gert, though. Probably. Likely. He thinks again of the first day they slithered into the mansion, her backpack so full and heavy that they left it in the front room while they explored because it was such a burden to carry. Gert never caught unawares, never caught unprepared, probably completely off center in the moments after the fact, after letting herself be swept up in the tide. He doesn’t think she planned it, not all of it, and he hadn’t either. Once the wave took him, he followed it in much the same way he has let impulses drift him through most of his life, but Gert is a woman with a well-made raft and a paddle who was likely suddenly tipped upside down and consumed by the stream. 

He’s not surprised about how she reacted after considering the situation, considering who she is and how she is, but it still hurts. To feel unwanted. To feel like she might have thought it wasn’t anything at all. To feel like she might think that he thought it wasn’t anything at all.

There’s a knock on the door that he wasn’t expecting at all, but Chase automatically says, “Come in,” even though it’s got to be at least two in the morning so he doesn’t understand why anyone else is up or why they’d be coming to him in the middle of the night. He’s hardly the best at comfort or companionship. 

“Hey,” Gert’s voice is soft, and he stops breathing, sits up and turns towards the door in an instant, in a flash because he wants to see her. 

He always wants to see her. 

“Hi,” he answers, and it’s dumb. This is dumb. He is dumb. But it’s the only word that will come out, and his throat is dry, and his palms are sweating while his heart races ten thousand miles a minute. While he wants to get up, close his fingers around hers, pull her to him and just hold her, he doesn’t move because he’s worried that it will all be too much, too fast again. Here he is, letting her lead. No matter what has happened between them, Chase has always trusted Gert.

There are lights in the Hostel because of course there are. Chase is a technical genius when he doesn’t shove himself into the box where he isn’t, and rigging lights up for them was the least he could do. Plus it was a good way for him and Alex to kind of bond. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be as close to the other guy as he is with some of the girls but that’s okay. At least they’re on friendly terms now instead of Alex still being mad at him about the laptop. He gets why they were upset, he does, but it’s been difficult for him to try and find the words to really explain why he did it without letting loose all of his secrets. And it doesn’t really matter now anyway.

There are lights in the Hostel, which means that he can see her, leaning against the closed door, fiddling with her hands, lips pressed together and looking at him in little more than sideways glances. As if he has the power to make her nervous. As if he has any power here at all when all he has to do is remember the way she shuddered against him when his fingers were inside of her, and his brain melts.

Who speaks first in this situation? Does he let his tongue and his mind unfurl, spilling everything inside of him like an overturned cup or does he wait for her? Chase doesn’t know this game. He knows a lot of games. He knows how to play them, and how to win them. Even though he’s not working out nearly as much as he was when this whole nonsense with their parents began, he is still in pretty good shape, physically, but that doesn’t matter here. This game is not about that so he waits.

“I’ve been avoiding you,” she finally says, probably once she has figured out that he is waiting and listening. And watching.

“I know you have.” It’s not meant to be a reflection of that earlier conversation. It’s really not, but Chase hears it the moment after he’s said it and hopes she doesn’t take it poorly.

The way her shoulders flinch slightly indicates that she might have, and he hates his mouth once again. “Yeah. About that. It’s. We should probably just both forget it happened. It will make things a lot easier if we can work together instead of just maneuvering around each other. There’s too few of us for that to really work in the long term. So we should just forget about it and call a truce. Friend truce. Everything back to the way it used to be.”

Chase Stein would rather have fallen into that seemingly bottomless pit in the construction site than forget about the way she fit perfectly into his arms. And he knows that he is supposed to be letting her lead, but he cannot follow her here. He cannot survive if there is no sun. “No.”

Gert looks stunned, eyes wide behind her glasses, mouth open, and her hands have stopped twisting. She looks similar to when his parents took the group of them to the mall on Chase’s seventh birthday and told the kids to all pick out something they wanted and they would buy it. He remembers stopping in the bookstore because Gert always wanted books, but she couldn’t find the one she was looking for, and Victor looming large over her, telling her that if she wanted something, she would have to ask the cashier for it or she wouldn’t be getting anything at all. The fear that filled her eyes, the way she made herself smaller in front of his father had propelled Chase forward; he had asked for her, hadn’t even stumbled over the long and intricate title.

She looks like that again now, stunned, uncertain, adrift. He wants to catch her in his hands and tell her that it will be okay. It’s not always her job to be so strong, and there is a lot he can shoulder. Maybe the entire world if she asked. He’d be Atlas if she asked.

“I don’t want to forget it,” he continues because it’s obvious that this is not what Gert had planned for this conversation so now she’s probably scrabbling a little bit to create a new scenario in her head. “I don’t want to pretend it never happened. I don’t want everything to go back to the way it used to be.”

“Chase,” she starts in the moment when he pauses but doesn’t go on.

“I still see you. That hasn’t changed.” He grips his hands into fists and swallows and forces the words out. “That won’t change, Gert, and I don’t want it to.”

He’ll never know everything that goes through her mind. He can sit there and watch her, the intricacies of her face, the way the muscle in her jaw contracts and releases, the shift in her eyes from one place to another, the expression that is fear and determination, he can catalogue and memorize all of these things but there will still be more to uncover. She is endlessly fascinating and eternally brave and infinitely her. There will always be more to uncover, and that’s okay. Chase actually likes challenges when there’s no trick at the other end. With Victor, there was always a trick, there was always a failure; Chase could never win so he stopped trying. This is not like that. There is no trick here. There is just Gert and everything about her, even her rough, hard edges that spring out when she is defensive, are not meant to hurt. She is not trying to hurt him even though she has.

“I’ll always see you.”

“Always is a lot.” She twists her hands together again, hard, and he can see how white her knuckles are.

When they first learned about the universe, when they first learned about numbers stretching out to infinity like the night sky around them, he remembers that it unnerved Gert to not know where the end was, to not be able to say where something stopped. He doesn’t mean to open that can of worms with always, but he doesn’t have a better qualifier. He doesn’t know how to measure the distance of his heart. “I’ll see you tonight and tomorrow and all this week.”

Her lips quirk, and it is almost a smile. He longs to kiss the corner of her lips, then all of them, to slowly explore the cavern of her mouth. “That’s a little better.”

“Then the week after. The month.” He doesn’t know how far to push his luck here. He is testing the waters desperate not to drown in a sudden squall. “Forty-three thousand, two hundred minutes.” What is concrete enough for Gert to feel safe? What is too abstract?

“Thirty days. You’ll see me for thirty days.” She sounds wistful.

“Is that not enough?” He can add days. He can add years. The average lifespan for a rich white male in the United States is between eighty and eighty-eight years, but he is no longer rich and they are runaways with uncertain futures so he figures that, right now if everything continues the way it is, he can probably drop that number to between seventy-four and seventy-six. On a good day. Assuming that there are no diseases or health issues in his family line that he needs to worry about. Assuming that they all don’t die tomorrow, which is possible because they are on precarious ground no matter what they tell Molly. He doesn’t think he can tell Gert that he wants to see her for the next 31,010,400 minutes because, while it has an end, it’s still too big. Not even his mind can properly picture what that would look like.

Gert shrugs, and he wants to ask her to come closer, wants to touch her, but waits. “How about we start there, and you can give me more time if you want to.”

“When,” he doesn’t mean to speak, it’s automatic, and Gert seems to blink at the quickness and the sureness of his answer. “No ifs there. I will give you more time when that runs out.” In as small or as large of an increment as she wants. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. If always is too much, he can break it down, give it to her piecemeal, little by little, until it’s easier to see the small concept growing into a larger one.

The enormity of the universe was too much for her. They started with the solar system. First the sun, then Mercury, little by little until Gert was in love with the idea of the cosmos, of something infinite and wonderful, even if he knew she was always a little sad at the fact that the light of the stars in their sky were pale reflections of something already dead and gone. 

“Okay. That’s good. That’s great. I thought,” she presses her lips together, hard, like the weight of all the thoughts in her head is behind the motion, and Chase extends a hand, though he still does not move toward her. 

“That it was just the moment?” he offers because, hey, he gets it. He does. It was. It was a lot. In that moment. It was fast, a car squealing through caution barricades without even slowing down to read the signs. It was haphazard and fueled by so much going on around them. Maybe some of it was just instinct, just need, needing to be close, needing comfort, but the problem is that it’s been there, in a smaller, less frantic form, inside his chest for so much longer and it’s not gone away even if it’s less of a forest fire and more of a lantern, softly glowing.

“Yeah,” she agrees, stepping forward, and then her hand is in his, fingers wound around his own, and Chase is pulling her gently to him, tucking his head against her stomach, his free arm encircling her waist, and her other hand is in his hair. 

The world has stopped. Nothing is dangerous. Nothing is wrong. Gert’s fingers are in his hair, and his fingers are clenched into the soft fabric of the shirt she wears, and everything smells like her. While it reminds him of another time when everything smelled like her, it is enough. It is so much more than enough. He closes his eyes, and thinks of a time when they were all at the beach, children in bathing suits and sunblock, covered in sand, sticky from ice cream, standing at the edges of waves, hand in hand together because Chase was not the strongest swimmer and something about the ocean, the massiveness of it, the way it could turn stormy and gray, reminded him of his father, terrifying. Gert’s hand in his, strong and sure, though small was reassuring. 

She is humming. Her fingers are still in his hair, and she is humming, not nervously the way she does sometimes, but gentle, quiet, the way that she does when she is pleased with something, the way she does when she feels safe. 

Chase glances up at her, and her eyes look the way they did in the room right after he said the words that started them down this spiral, soft and full of him. There is something he wants to say, but he’s worried that it might startle her, break this quiet moment, this peace they have fallen into. He needs this, but he also needs to say it. He doesn’t know which one he needs more. “Will you,” he stops and licks his lips, and her fingers in his hair do not stop, she does not let go of his hand, and he goes forward, onward, like he did at the beach, though this is an entirely different but equally terrifying ocean. “Will you stay here? With me? We don’t have to do anything. I don’t. That was too fast. I don’t want to move too fast.” He could not breathe when he was inside of her, and it was wonderful, it was everything, but he is not sure he can be there again now. 

Hesitation is clear on her face, but her fingers do not stop moving through his hair even though she has stopped humming. One of those is a good thing, the other is not decided yet. “Move over, and get under the covers. It’s cold.”

He sighs because he hates letting her go, but the reward will be worth the price so he does it, unwrapping from her slowly, inch by inch. Chase thinks it might take him three years to manage it, knows that he is actually going slow because Gert giggles at him and nudges his shoulder with her hand, which he catches and presses a kiss to the wrist that shocks them both into silence. Once he is under the covers, on the edge of where the mattress turns into a black hole, Gert slips off her shoes and joins him, arms and legs almost immediately wrapped around him, face against his chest. He buries his face in her hair and just breathes. It comes easily, though he burns and wants. 

When she kisses him this time, once again beating him to the punch, it is slow, languorous. They have time. Even if she is only counting down on the forty-three thousand, two hundred minutes he gave her earlier, that is enough time. So much time. He won’t waste one second of it, won’t take any of it for granted, even though he plans to keep refilling it from the well of his life until it runs out. 

Eventually, they fall asleep wound around each other, fully clothed, having done no more than kiss and cling, chaste compared to that first night. Every time Chase moves even slightly, Gert follows him across the mattress, like a plant chasing the sun.


End file.
